The Genus Garden - Musings From Joff, Our Head Gardener

It’s getting colder, the leaves are falling fast and it’s time to tidy up dead and tatty growth and prepare for winter. Protect slightly tender herbaceous plants like penstemon or Verbena bonariensis...
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Bulb planting

Ordering  spring bulbs is an exciting job.  An evening in with the fire lit, a cat on your lap, and bulb catalogues spread all around.  Perfect!!  But it’s not until...
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Berries for the birds

It’s at this time of year that we realise the garden here at Genus HQ, whilst still retaining colour in the flower borders, is lacking colour elsewhere, particularly in the...
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Rosy prospects

New french doors at Genus HQ have replaced a window and necessitated the removal of a grape vine that was originally trained over it.  Groundworks had disturbed the roots, grapes...
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A peeling clematis

The north facing wall of the cottage at Genus HQ has a number of climbers but in autumn the ‘orange peel’ clematis ‘Bill MacKenzie’ shines a light into this shadier...
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Autumn is the time to clear up the garden and begin soil preparation and bulb planting for next spring. Tall shrubs like buddleia which will be pruned hard in spring,...
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With over 2,500 moth species in the UK we thought we’d try and see what lurked in the Genus HQ garden at night.  So we set up a light trap...
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Party favourites

You may remember our disappointment a few weeks ago when we wrote of the sorry state of the garden at Genus HQ after the winds and rain had battered the...
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Best behaviour

Plants are like children.  There are the naughty troublesome ones that require constant supervision, the loud shouty ones that are actually quite delicate, and the ones that just quietly get...
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Dividing iris

Forward notes are a wonderful thing.  There’s always so much to do in the garden that without some planning important jobs would be missed.  And so it was this week...
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Spring planning

We mentioned late season colour last time and we also mentioned that our focus was on our spring borders which have been lacklustre for the last few years. Consequently the...
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Colouring In

We’ve been honing the late season colour palette of the garden at Genus HQ over the last few years, going from ‘not a lot’ to ‘more than enough’.  Each year...
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Hard Graft

Scion, cleft, four flap, and whip are some of the terms we’re getting acquainted with over the next few weeks; words we haven’t used since our college days! Last week...
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Cherry Aid

2020 must surely go down as the gardeners’ ‘year of the cherry’.  We’ve waited years for our trees to produce a respectable crop and this year they excelled, benefiting from...
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We’ve talked about the climbing plants at Genus HQ before and we’ve probably mentioned the philadelphus on the north side of the cottage.  Planted in the border some years ago...
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Chelsea Results

No not the latest football scores!  We’ve already mentioned how organised we’ve been this year with our mulching and timely staking.  Another job we carried out was the much vaunted...
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Pretty in Pink

We’ve started spotting one of our favourite plants in several gardens recently.  Deservedly so.  Dianthus carthusianorum comes from Spain and other parts of Europe where it’s primarily a grassland species but...
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High summer is here with gardens in full bloom and plenty of vegetables to crop and enjoy. Here’s how to keep on top of it all: With garden centres teaming...
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Annual leaves

After the excitement of spring and the fecundity of early June we have started to fill areas in the garden with annual flowers.  Some have already been sown in-situ and...
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We’ve had a busy few days in the Genus garden.  For some time a large Choisya has threatened to block a path and crowd out a lovely variegated holly.  We...
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Pond life

Our pond at Genus HQ brings us so much joy as well as a myriad of life into the garden.  There’s not a month in the year when something isn’t...
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